The Palantir Blog

At Palantir, our mission is to find or develop solutions for the world’s hardest problems. Since 2010, our annual scholarship has helped us discover and reward students doing just that. Our scholarship is now targeted towards undergraduate women and sponsored by our Women in Engineering group. This year, from a record pool of applicants, we chose nine finalists who we believe represent the best of what women in technology have to offer.

Women in Cybersecurity will bring together women leaders from the cybersecurity field to discuss the evolving cyber threat and opportunities for practitioners in this growing field. Hosted by Melody Hildebrandt from Palantir Technologies and Elena Kvochko of the World Economic Forum, the event will feature leaders from the prosecutorial, academic, financial services, and other industry fields to discuss their diverse experiences in the the cybersecurity field and lessons learned for future leaders.

It is estimated that on any given night, 50,000 veterans are homeless in the United States, including over 12,000 Iraq and Afghanistan veterans. For homeless veterans across the U.S., the process of finding permanent housing can be difficult and slow. Homeless service providers struggle to meet the complicated federal and local requirements for funding and housing, and legacy databases are siloed and outdated. Veterans end up bouncing between various organizations, filling out dozens of forms, and sitting on housing waiting lists for up to 300 days.

With much of the US focusing on the dinner table at Thanksgiving, we at Palantir wanted to share a video about our work helping Grameen Foundation and other partner organizations use data to alleviate food insecurity and improve livelihoods for smallholder farmers around the world. Improving these farmers’ lives represents one of the world’s most important problems, as over two billion people make their living from agriculture, and smallholder farmers making up 70% of the world’s extreme poor. Watch the video below to see how our technology is helping our partners better target products and services to improve farmers’ productivity and sustainability, optimize farming practices to improve crop yields, and invest in services that work through more effective program monitoring & evaluation. It is critical for organizations working in the space to use data effectively in order to support these outcomes, and we are looking forward to building on this body of work in 2015 to continue to support our partners’ excellent work around the world.

Throughout 2014, our partners at C4ADS have been using Palantir Gotham to uncover illicit networks involved in elephant poaching and the lucrative illegal ivory trade. C4ADS has integrated and analyzed open source data to shine a light on transnational networks trafficking in elephant ivory and other illegal environmental goods, while working with a coalition of NGOs, government partners, and private corporations. As an example of direct impact from this work, C4ADS’ analysis recently helped East African authorities identify a likely illicit shipment, leading to the seizure of at least $11 million in illegal environmental goods and making for one of the largest environmental crime seizures in African history.

In September, the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI) celebrated its 10th Annual Meeting. Since 2005, more than 3,100 Commitments to Action have been made, improving the lives of over 430 million people. These commitments are dedicated to a range of key issues around the world, including Disaster Relief and Recovery, Global Health, Women/Girls, and Clean Energy.

Coding. Algorithms. System Design. These interviews, to assess core skills necessary for a successful career at Palantir, remain at the heart of our hiring process. But as our company and products have evolved, so has the range of skills we need in candidates. We’ve recently added a decomposition interview to our slate, and, as we’ve donein the past, we’re going to go ahead and offer some tips for how to do well in this portion of your Palantir interview.

The U.S. veteran population includes more than 21 million men and women who have served their country in uniform, ranging from veterans of the “greatest generation” who fought in World War II to veterans completing their first enlistment. Within this population are 6 million “Gulf War-era” veterans who were part of, or have served since, the first Gulf conflict in the early 1990s.

AtlasDB is a massively scalable datastore and transactional layer that
can be placed on top of any key-value store to give it ACID properties.
This is the first of several blog posts that will introduce AtlasDB and
describe how we built it at Palantir.